Waste of Electric and Eletronic Equipment (WEEE) Disposal

Waste of Electric and Eletronic Equipment (WEEE) Disposal

Electronic Device Recycle Snd Bhd (EDR) is a company that provides solution on issues about recycling digital waster and handling digital waste properly according to global and local standards. After Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) was launched in Malaysia in 1996, the trend of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) started enter to our country. Nearly past 10 years, the users of computers and mobile phones rapidly increase, in the contrast, the level of e-waste is fast-growing as well. Every year thousands and thousands secondary graduates swarm into public and private universities and colleges, and each of them, at least, owns a desktop or laptop computer to enhance their study. This underlines that thousands of laptops or desktops will be sold to them and five years later the current new laptops and desktops will become debris in dump. If waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) does not dispose well, it is hazardous to environment. It is sad to say that much of our undergraduates have less knowledge about this. This is why EDR need to take the responsibility to create a campaign of creating awareness for undergraduates about the dangerous of e-waster. Objectives One of the main objectives of this campaign Creating awareness for undergraduates about harmfulness of e-waste. Based on research, only 10 percent of undergraduates were aware of e-waste and 90 percent of them realized that WEEE could harm environment but they do not have idea of how to manage WEEE. The second objective of this campaign is about encouraging undergraduates and publics to take action in recycling e-waste. According to Perunding Good Earth (n.d.), 18.7% PC users still kept their broken computers in house. Most of them do not have the idea about how and where to dispose e-waste properly. Literature Review In public relations, everything should start with research. This step is very important in the process of public relation even in organizing a campaign (Lattimore & others 2007). There are two ways to conducting research which are primary research and secondary. There are no best way to conduct all researches as it depends on the research topic. Before organizing a campaign, we should do a lot of researches on determine public opinion. So, we could only organize an effective event. According to Baskin, Aronoff and Lattimore (1997), every effective public relations campaign depends on planing. They argued that good planning could save a lot of time. They described that every plan should have a goal and it refer to the basic direction an organization is heading in. The purpose, mission, objectives, and strategies are parts of the goal. In her book, Shirley Harrison (2000) stated that planning always started with analysis. The reason is to identify the position of the campaign, set target audience and create objectives. Then, we could only move to next step. During analysis stage, the target audience could be determined. To determine the target audience, as Guth and Marsh (2003) suggested, we can categories them to two publics, which are primary and secondary public. After research and planning, the next stage in process model of public relations that Lattimore (1997) suggested is Action. The action stage of campaign is during the stage of conducting the event as well as in the stage of promoting the event. In evaluation stage, as Lattimore (1997) suggested, there should be measurement techniques to check the effectiveness. Lattimore (1997) also suggested three measurement techniques to check effectiveness of the campaign in pre-, during and post-campaign, which are "Implementation Checking", "In-Progress Monitoring", and "Outcome Evaluation". Methodology The methods of composing public opinion for this campaign could be survey and interviews.
The objective of conducting survey is to obtain quantitative data that could be helpful to e-waste campaign to identify quantity of PCs and mobile phones that undergraduates own, quantity of PCs and mobile phones that family of undergraduates owns, and overall information of undergraduates know about e-waste. It is very important to identify the background of target publics. The campaign would be worth nothing that it is not custom made for target publics. For conducting interviews, the objective is to identify knowledge of undergraduates about e-waste, effective methods of communicating with undergraduates, and overall interest of undergraduates about recycling e-waste. Interviewing undergraduates could help to identify psychographic profile of undergraduates. Understand psychographic profile of undergraduates could help us to communicate with them effectively and efficiently. Audience In this campaign, there are various publics that would be targeted on. The primary target public is shown below:
Undergraduates – Undergraduates in public and private from universities and colleges are the main target. The reason of choosing this particular group of public as our primary target audience is because of they are one of the heavy users of electronic device. At the same time, this group of public is not the primary public of EDR because most of the clients of EDR is mostly from cooperate world.
The secondary target publics are shown below:
Public universities, Private universities and colleges staff – Professors, Lectures and campus staff are target public as well. It is because they are electronic device user also. Family members of undergraduates – Family members are the immediate figure related to undergraduates. The message of campaign can be sent to them through undergraduates. Family members can participate in seminar about e-waste and recycling e-waste. Calendar/ Timeline In the pre-campaign stage, it is believed that the best time to plan for this campaign is one month. The duration should not be too long as it could waste budget and it should not be too short as well because of lacking time to do research and planning (Allen 2002). The duration during the campaign could be more than a month. It is because the team of running the campaign need to travel to several universities and colleges to do roadshow for raising awareness about harmfulness of e-waste. the duration could be three months as there will be twelve seminars in different local universities and each seminars fall on Friday. So, the campaign needs twelve weeks to finish. Besides Friday, there will be several road shows in different colleges and universities around west Malaysia. After finish a seminar, the team would spend one week time to monitor the media to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. So, when all seminars finish, the team would use two weeks time to compel all information for evaluation. Budget Rob Hard (n.d.) stated that having a plan for proportioning budget could help the campaign not over budget. The venue rental could allocate 20 percents of total budget as it is needed to rent some places for road show. For the fund of research and development, it could be allocated 10 percents. 22 percents is needed for transportation and accommodation as the team needs to travel across board. Fund for human resources is about 23 percents. Promotion and advertising could be used 20 percents. For creating a safer budget plan, the emergency fund should be added, which is about 5 percents. Evaluation Guth and Marsh (2003) stated that the first and forth step of public relations process are research and evaluation, and they are most important step. Lattimore (1997) suggested three evaluation segments which are "implementation checking", "In-Progress Monitoring" and "Outcome Evaluation". In the segment of "implementation checking", the team need to be questioned among themselves whether the tactics that are used can reach the target audience, whether the plan can turn to actual action, and analyze the original plan again see whether the plan is the best plan. In the second segment, "In-Progress Monitoring", the evaluation process is about checking whether the campaign is reaching its objectives. It can be checked by monitor coverage of the media, respond from participants and monitor the number of participants. In the last segment, "Outcome Evaluation", it is about evaluating the campaign after the campaign is finished. It could be checked by monitor media, feedback form participants, and numbers of participants. If the campaign is successful, the evaluation result will reach the objectives of the campaign which are stated before the event. Otherwise, it is a fail campaign. Conclusion
This campaign can effectively spread the information about harmfulness and knowledge of e-waste to undergraduates and increasing undergraduates participating recycling e-waste. This could bring a direct impact on reducing landfill, water pollution and air pollution. If the planning of this campaign is following public relations' theories, it will be success. Recommendation For suggestion, EDR can work with government or governmental bodies, for example, Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), to organize this event. It is because of link the campaign with government can be easier to apply to have road show in local universities.